


Triptych

by SLWalker



Series: The (Second) Book of James [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s09e06 Heaven Can't Wait, Gen, Season 9 AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5248274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker





	1. Prologue

_“The minstrel boy to the war is gone…”_

                                        The voice rose, pure and beautiful; layered in joy and melancholy,  
                                                                                              it sang some immeasurable distance above

 

                                                                                                                                     _“...in the ranks of death you’ll find him.”_

 

                                                                     forever out of reach.

 

_“His father’s sword he has girded on….”_

 

                                            If he still had wings, he could fly up to find it.

 

                                                                                                                                     _“...and his wild harp slung behind him!”_

 

                                                                                             He was beyond if.  
                                                                                                    Beyond flight.

 

_“‘Land of song!’” said the warrior bard,  
                  “‘Though all the world betrays thee…’”_

 

The choir was silent; only one lone voice rang out,  
                    too high to reach.

 

                                                                                                                                     _“‘One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,  
                                                                                                                                                           “‘One faithful harp shall praise thee!’”_

 

“You’re not listening,” Samandiriel said, wistful and sad. “You have to _listen_ , Castiel.”

 

He had no voice with which to answer, but if he could have, he would have said he was

                                                     neither warrior, nor bard;

                                                                                        had only ever been one,  
                                                                                                                             or the other,

                                                                                                            and was now neither.

 

Samandiriel’s voice whispered just behind his shoulder, “But once, in love, you chose _both_.”

But when he turned to look, his brother was gone.

 

 

And, as he often did these days, Castiel woke curled up around himself on a threadbare couch he had made his bed, unconsciously shielding his head with his arms and wondering where he’d find the courage to face another day.


	2. I.

 

The rain pattered against the windows, against the cedar shutters bleached gray by time, and in the pre-dawn light, the house looked both cool and peaceful; stately shadows and soft curves, cozy and intimate. It was the perfect morning to crawl over onto their overstuffed loveseat in front of the windows with a book and a fuzzy blanket and a mug of the fresh brewed coffee that was flavoring the air, reading by yellow lamp until enough light came in from outside.

Claire knew that if she did that, she wouldn't ever move again.

Each step was measured; kitchen cupboard, pull down two mugs. Coffee maker. French vanilla creamer for her mother. Half-and-half with a few drops of honey for her. Hers went into a travel mug. Her mother's went into one that said #1 Mom, the one she had bought at a Santa's Workshop when she was eight. She stirred. She took hers in hand. She leaned on the counter.

She breathed.

Her mother watched her from the opposite counter, across the kitchen, her hand held over her mouth because it kept quivering.

It had been a conversation, a plea, a fight. It had been a war, and it had been tears and anger and shouting and more tears, and now at the end, all that was left were those. The tears. She could see her mother wind up a dozen times to say something, but they both knew they'd already said all of the same things, over and over and over again. It was rote now. There wasn't a point in going over it again.

Claire buried her words in a sip of her coffee, a brief escape from her mother's gaze, and let out a slow trembling breath through her nose.

"I love you," her mother said. They wobbled, the words; they broke and Claire didn't even try to pretend that it was the steam from her coffee blurring her own vision.

"I love you, too," Claire said, and it didn't surprise her that it was just as wobbly.

"You have everything?"

"Yeah."

She had packed her car the night before, and each piece had felt like an ending. She had her cell phone, she had her tablet and laptop, she had plenty of money she'd saved up working all summer since graduation, she had a few decent leads. As far as anyone knew, with the exception of her mother, she was on her way to college. It was the truth; she was going to start part-time with the winter semester, though. Neither her nor Mom thought it was a good idea to tell anyone that she was actually heading out to go and find an Angel of the Lord.

Then again, her mother didn't think it was a good idea at all. But if there was one thing Claire had learned over the past six years, it was that there was no way to outrun something when every step was a memory.

"You'll call?" her mother asked, finally stepping over to pick up her own cup of coffee, though her hands were shaking so badly that she had to hold it in both.

"I promise," Claire answered, clutching onto her composure all the harder. "Every night."

They had two choices when they lost Dad for the second time; fall apart or cleave together. It wasn't a choice to be made once, either. They had to make it and keep making it again, and again, and again. Sometimes they dodged the other way; sometimes Claire went to parties and did things she still regretted, sometimes her mother finished a bottle of wine solo and then sobbed until she was in the bathroom throwing up. Sometimes they got so lost in their own miseries and heartbreaks that they didn't see each other for days, just two ghosts swirling around the remnants of their lives. And then they cried. And then they dragged each other back onto the narrow, lonely road to survival.

And then the angel had shown up, and they'd lost Dad again. For the third and final time.

Claire didn't remember everything that he'd said, but she remembered the moment when she saw him there, and her heart soared, and then she remembered the single moment later when it shattered, and then she cried so hard that she forgot how to breathe. She remembered that he was wearing Daddy's coat, and white under that, and she remembered his wide-eyed imploring look, and she remembered that, in his desperation to keep her mother from closing him out, he'd called her _Ames_. And she also remembered the way his head snapped back when her mother busted him in the mouth with her fist, too.

She had been almost sixteen, and the same angel who took her Dad away was the same one pleading now for them to listen, because apparently a hallucination of her father told him to come to them, and her father was dead and gone and had been for awhile.

Turned out that even angels could go crazy.

Sometimes, she wondered if Castiel realized that his fifteen minute visit a few years ago took them almost a year to get over, and then she realized no, he probably didn't, and then she got angry, and then she got over it. Again and again and again. Claire had a slightly more balanced view of the whole thing than her mother, but then again, she'd _been_ him, albeit briefly. Even years later, she could remember the heat and light and power singing through her like a symphony, and the indescribable voice whispering in her ear that he could save them, she just had to be unafraid.

Oddly, it was the one thing Claire never was anymore. Afraid. For awhile there, she had been. But she wasn't now. She wondered if she ever would be again.

"I wish you wouldn't do this," her mother finally said, and Claire had known it was coming. Wasn't the first time. Or the fiftieth.

Even so, the resigned tone never got easier to live with. No matter how many times Claire tried to reassure her that she wasn't going to disappear like her father, her mother still bore the scars of all of it. They all did.

“I just want to know, Mom." Claire turned and topped off her coffee, breathing carefully through her nose. "He said I could ask. He said he'd tell us. I just... I just want to know."

"I know." Unlike Claire, though, her mother didn't want to know. Claire didn't understand that, when she was sixteen. Not even when she was seventeen. It was only within the past six months or so that she actually _got it_ , got why Amelia Novak just couldn't take anymore. Because the closer she came to actually going and finding out, the less Claire knew if she could take it herself. "I hope you find what you're looking for," her mother added, and Claire honestly didn't know if either of them believed it.

"Me too," was the only answer she could give.

When she pulled out of the driveway, just as the sky was turning into a low gray, she looked at her mother standing in the doorway, backlit by the foyer light and didn't need to see to know that they were wearing the same mask of tears.

It was, after all, all that was left.

 

 

She did call every night. She drove, researched and eventually, she haunted hunts. She slept in her car a lot. She ate more cheap fast food than she could ever want. She ended up on the Atlantic coast. She ended up heading back west. She drove and listened to her MP3s, and she interfered on every ghost-hunting mission she could find. She gave her cell number to every single hunter she pissed off and told them to tell the Winchesters that Claire Novak was looking for them.

“Why the Hell would you want to talk to them?” one of them asked, eying her suspiciously. She wasn’t surprised that the Winchesters weren’t universally loved by all and sundry. Nor was she surprised by the fact that despite that, hunters tended to protect their own.

“They owe me.” Claire shrugged, nonchalantly. “I want to call in my marker.”

She didn’t know if it was strictly a truth. After all, they had saved the world. But then again, so had her father.

All of these years later, and Claire still wasn’t sure how to keep score.

 

 

There were things she liked, she found, about being on the road. She liked

sitting on the hood of her car in a corridor of fall leaves, eating a sub from a family owned sub shop.

walking into a local diner and ducking her head with a smile when the old farmers at the bar offered to buy her a coffee; maybe it wasn’t exactly feminist to accept the chivalry, but she learned what the difference between wheat and smelts were, and lost two hours in great conversation.

pulling off on a quiet roadside late at night to look up at the stars and remember when she first learned their names.

crying in a fall thunderstorm, where no one could tell her tears from the rain; this felt almost too much like freedom.

 

 

Twenty-nine days later, Sam called.

Thirty days later, Dean reluctantly gave her what she needed to know. She barely refrained from calling him an asshole.

If she wanted to kill Castiel, why the hell would she have ever contacted the Winchesters in the first place?

 

 

Thirty-two days later, and she spent an entire day curled up in a cheap motel room, watching the late fall rain beating on the windows and trying to remember what it felt like to breathe _before_. Before. Before everything.

She couldn't.

 

 

Thirty-three days later, she managed to talk herself back into going to find him, and decided that there was no way she was going to back down now. He had answers. She wanted them. She wanted them, and maybe if she had them, she could meet up with Jessica and Shawna at UCLA, she could put all of this behind her, she could go and live the life she was meant to have, instead of this thing, this halfway thing, that maybe could sometimes be called life, but maybe sometimes couldn't be, too.

 

 

Thirty-four days later, Claire stared through the wide, open windows of a gas station in Nowhere Idaho, took one look at the angel wearing her father's skin and thought maybe her mother had been right all along, maybe this was something that they had to let go of, maybe she needed to just accept that Daddy was in Heaven and that the crazy angel had nothing for them. Maybe if her mother was right, she wouldn't have to take in the familiar profile and unfamiliar expression and wonder what he could possibly say that could ever ease this empty, aching spot that had been left since she heard the words, _I am not your father._

Because in her head, there was a little girl, who cried for Mommy and Daddy and God, whoever could save them; in her head, too, was a teenager whose father wasn't there to teach her how to drive or to get angry with her when she came home after too many jello shots at a party she wasn't supposed to be at, and there was a young adult whose father had been gone before he could help her apply to colleges. There was everything in her that had lost him once, twice, three times; there was everything in her that resented that he couldn't die like anyone else, he had to be taken from them by an angel who was still walking around with his face, and there was also everything in her that _understood_ why he had said yes, because she had, too, to that very same angel.

Claire was all of those and she was also none of those.

So, she pulled out of the parking lot. She drove about two miles down the road, barely able to see the double yellow line. She pulled off to the side, jerkily. She wrapped her hands around her steering wheel.

She sobbed.

She sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, until she couldn't breathe, until her hair was plastered to her cheeks with her tears, until her chest hurt and her lungs ached and her stomach protested and all of her muscles felt wrung out like dish rags. She sobbed until she just _couldn't_ anymore.

And then, because she was her father's daughter, she turned her car around and drove back.


	3. II.

The alarm on his cell went off at 4:30AM, beeping and vibrating against the floorboards, an irritating noise that did exactly what it was supposed to do. Alarm was, indeed, the entirely proper thing to call it. On the rare occasions he managed to sleep long enough for it to achieve its purpose, it was all too effective at waking him up, usually by making him jump out of his stolen skin.

This hadn't been one of those mornings; Castiel had been awake for some indeterminate amount of time already, staring into the darkness, listening to the low mumble of talk radio and trying in vain to go back to sleep.

The only thing he disliked more than his alarm was sleeping. For more reasons than he felt like naming. He had never liked any form of unconsciousness. The process of falling asleep was difficult and uncomfortable. Being asleep was a vulnerability that went against some six thousand years of soldier instinct. Being asleep meant nightmares. It was hard to find a position to sleep in that felt anything like what he supposed would be considered natural. When it was still warmer out, he would wake up sweating; now that it was cold, he often woke up shivering.

Then there was the disorientation upon waking; the rapid catalogue of missing senses, missing limbs and missing _himself_. There were various aches and pains to account for, either left over from the day before, or newly acquired by sleeping wrong. There was the long, slow, sinking sensation of facing another long, slow day.

Like he did every morning for the past few months, he made himself get up anyway.

He made himself fight gravity long enough to stoke last night's coals in his wood stove. He turned off the radio he only kept on for noise. He made certain that nothing had moved or shifted in the night that would signal any unexpected and unwanted visitors. He scrubbed over his eyes with his hands. He stretched, shivered, stretched some more; one of the things he did like the feeling of. He gamely got dressed and cleaned up his single, above-garage room. He looked forward to coffee and work; if nothing else, he was a good employee and Nora was good company.

He donned Steve like he donned his vest, and as the sky lightened, his mood would often follow. Though, with the days so short, that was usually after he made it to work.

It wasn't all bad. He had discovered things to make it bearable; he liked having his own space. It was small, but it was his own. Castiel, of all beings, knew just how much an illusion the sense of security at having it was, but he figured that the self-delusion was fair enough in his case, and so he was happy for it. He liked tending the fire. He liked it when the morning light climbed high enough to shine gold through his window. He liked the walk to work, even in the cold, though not when it rained. It was three miles down the road, a straight walk, and the motion of one foot in front of the other was comforting in its rhythm.

Of all of the relatively unexpected things he had found he liked, work was probably the least unexpected. He was not quite so naive as Dean thought; yes, he was well aware that he was an entry level employee working for minimum wage, doing a job that often fell to teenagers. It had taken him less than a week to figure that out. But it was also his, and while it was less than ideal, he got as much free coffee as he wanted and it was time consuming without being mindless.

Though, he often had to wonder at the notion of consuming time in the first place. To what end?

The answer to that was, of course, death. He was still working out how he felt about that. Dying as a human didn't feel anything like dying as an angel had. It was more visceral. Pain was not exclusive to humans; angels felt it too. But it was different. Everything was different. Emotions which had been purely metaphysical suddenly became exceptionally physical; anger made his shoulders stiff. Fear was terrible; it clawed through the belly, it made everything tremble in anticipation of pain. Sadness was also terrible. Guilt. Regret. Loneliness. _Longing._ Humans felt them bodily; they reacted with nerve endings and bioelectrical impulses and hormones.

He had lived in this flesh for over five years, and he never realized. All of that time, and he never realized.

Now it was all he lived in, and some days he wanted nothing more than to claw out of it and some days he wanted nothing more than to cling to it as long as possible, staving off the inevitable until he had no choice in the matter.

Today was a day he wanted neither. Today, he would pull on his coat and he would walk to work, he would do his job, he would walk home from work, he would read and listen to the radio, and then he would wrestle with sleep again. The same as almost any other day.

Except, it turned out that it wasn't any other day at all.

 

 

Later, he would reflect that he was, in a colloquialism, _pole axed_. It was a term he had picked up somewhere along the way, and once he managed to overcome the most literal interpretation of that description (stunning livestock with a blow to the forehead), he found it to be a wholly apt description for certain emotional states. Both in him taking the part of livestock, and in the feeling of being stunned by a blow, even if not physically.

In the midst of the feeling, however, there was no time to quantify it.

"Claire."

All at once, he was hyper aware of everything around him; the positions of the two other customers, Nora in the back, the counter in front of him, a level of awareness that would have been angelic if he still had the senses to go with it, and he was aware of nothing at all, but the girl-- young woman standing in front of him, looking at him with the same eyes he saw in the mirror earlier in the morning.

She had been crying. She was much older than he remembered. She--

"You're shaking," she said.

This came as something of a surprise to Castiel, who had not been aware that he was; he blinked and looked down at his hands, fisted on the counter, and added another thing to the list of human things that were unpleasant. While it wasn't his first time trembling, it was the first time he'd not been aware of it.

"I'm fine," he answered, and then he also became aware of how the words scraped as he said them, and looked back up. He thought he should probably ask her if she needed something, and then he thought -- rightly, he was sure later -- that it would probably be considered one of the worst questions he could have asked. Niceties weren't his strong point, but there were things even he didn't miss. "How are you?"

Claire huffed a laugh, mirthless; edged and shaky. "Uh. I don't know."

"It's an adrenaline response," Castiel offered, helpfully. Or, he hoped it was helpfully. "I don't care for it, either. It's very inconvenient. I understand, evolutionarily, what the point was, but--" He was babbling. He shut his mouth and leaned back a little, trying to process the vast array of foreign nerve impulses that, even after over five years of wearing this body, he was still a novice at.

"Fight or flight," Claire said, hands shaking as she dug through her pockets and then picked up a packet of gum from the display, setting it down and counting out change. Halfway through, she reached up and rubbed the heel of her palm across her face; it came away wet, and Castiel added another inconvenient physical reaction to his list when her tears made something in his chest _hurt_.

"Or freeze," he said, absently, taking his hands off of the counter and rubbing them against each other. Which was surprisingly soothing, though less so right now than usual. "Why are you here?"

Claire looked up and raised an eyebrow, just a moment of it, then pushed the exact change for the gum across the counter. "I wanted to talk."

He wasn't sure why that surprised him. "I--" He looked up at the wall clock, then back at her. "I don't finish my shift until three."

"I can come back," she answered, watching with something that might have been disbelief as he finally got himself together enough to ring up the sale. "Okay?"

Castiel looked back up. "Okay." This was dread. It mixed with adrenaline in ways that made breathing-- a trial.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, and with a petulance he didn't often acknowledge, he cursed the necessity of oxygen.

"Okay," Claire said, taking her gum and the receipt with still trembling fingers. She lingered a moment longer and then drifted towards the door and out, looking dazed and teary.

Apparently, he wasn't the only one pole axed.

Castiel rested his hands on the counter, dropped his head and tried to remember how to breathe.

 

 

Human brains were, all at once, fascinating and troublesome. They were capable of a great deal. But they stored things differently. Castiel found it disconcerting (putting it very mildly), how much he couldn't recall at will. He remembered things in pieces, not as a whole; he remembered certain things more than other things. Even his own memory had been corrupted when he lost his grace; while he could still remember his own vast history, he couldn't remember all of it chronologically or in great detail. The edges blurred. One piece, one image, would then bounce to something else that was similar, but not in order. Sometimes all of it fell apart and then he was lucky he could remember what he ate for breakfast.

Routine helped. The more he kept to a schedule, the less he got lost. He was a quick study. He picked up new tasks with relative ease. He sorted them and ordered them until they felt comfortable and comforting, and then he resisted changing it unless the benefits of the change outweighed the disorientation of it. His room above Will Jackson's garage was a positive change; it gave him something that was his, rent was extraordinarily cheap and Will was fair company -- they mostly left one another alone, but Will was a regular at the store, and sometimes gave him a ride when he needed to go further than he wanted to on his feet, and so it was agreeable all around, and it kept him from having to keep dodging Nora's occasional questioning looks.

This was not his day.

Even routine didn't help. He kept looking at the clock. Time, before, had such little meaning; angels rarely counted minutes, and he knew he was different in that he had a better concept of _was-is-is to come_ than most, but living so thoroughly within it was just another thing to get used to.

So many things. So many things. His best label for his own humanity, thus far, was _very difficult_.

His humanity, right now, was continued dread and anticipation, equal parts. Some part of him wanted to stop the clock (he could have done that, though not for long, only several months ago), and some part of him just wanted to get on with it.

And he wondered where she was. Claire Novak. He _worried_. Now that she existed within his sphere again, he worried about whether she was sitting in her car in the cold, or whether she had perhaps gone to the local social nexus (Wal Mart; a place he discovered was useful and also very, very disconcerting and too bright) a town over to stay warm. Or to the only diner in this town, which he occasionally haunted himself when he could justify the cost. He worried and eventually the desire to see that she was not freezing in her car outweighed the dread, and he clocked out at three and didn't waste time walking out the doors.

She was not freezing; she was waiting, arms crossed, leaning against her driver's side door. The sky threatened sleet, agreeing with the radio in the store which also said it was likely. Her hair whipped in the breeze, muted gold, and it was shockingly painful looking at her.

"I keep thinking maybe I'll know how to live again. That maybe you can tell me," Claire said, without preamble, which did nothing to help that ache. "No car?"

"No," Castiel answered, cautiously, stopping about five feet from her and fiddling at the buttons on his coat for a moment before shoving his hands into his pockets. "No car."

Claire nodded, palming over her face, then offered a small, brittle smile. "Well, what now?"

There were an infinite number of possibilities. He could do what cowardice and perhaps self-preservation dictated, turn around, walk home and make it clear that he wanted no part of talking with her. He could give into the clawing feeling of panic and hyperventilate for awhile. He could say something foolish and thereby cause more pain than he's already caused her. He could apologize. (He would apologize; she was owed that. Once he figured out the words. No matter how much he meant it when he said he was sorry, Dean always made sure he knew how little it was worth.) "I could buy you coffee?" he tried, before he actually thought about that option.

Claire stared, looking like she was also contemplating infinite possibilities. Her mouth tightened, and she looked off for a moment, and he realized with a jolt that he did the same thing. Then she gave a short nod. "Hop in. Where's good?"

"There's a diner downtown."

"Okay."

"Okay."

 

 

It was half a cup in, before Claire spoke again. At least to him. "This is like pulling teeth," she said, slumping back on her side of the table, and focusing all of her attention on stirring her coffee. Though, it must have been exceedingly well stirred by now.

Relieved that he wasn't being scrutinized, he took a sip of his own coffee. One cream, no sugar. Then he found his mind winging off wondering if caffeine was such a good idea right now, given his already apparently unpredictable nervous system, and resolved to ask for decaffeinated next time Leslie came around to refill their mugs. "How's your mother?"

"Worried. Pissed. Surviving," Claire said, succinctly, taking her spoon out and setting it aside on the napkin. "She didn't want me to do this. Come and find you. She thought I was borrowing trouble, especially after that so-called meteor shower back in May." She looked up, then, frowning. "How did it happen?"

Castiel should not have been surprised that Claire would have a better grasp on things than most; even so, he was startled by the question. He barely had time to figure out how to feel about everything else, before he was startled by it. "A spell." He tried to think about how to explain it, including his culpability in it, and got tangled up in events until he lost all track of what he wanted to say. Finally, he settled on, "The Metatron cast all angels from Heaven, excluding himself. I was his unwitting accomplice."

"You're not an angel anymore."

"No."

Claire just nodded, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. It quivered, then steadied, and she stroked the side of her mug with a thumb. "I'm going to college. Starting late, and only part-time, but..."

"Where?" he asked, watching her contemplate the tabletop, and trying to get a grasp on _any_ of how he was feeling about all of this.

"UCLA. No major yet."

"Is it nice?"

"Yeah." Claire smiled a little, distantly. "Mom doesn't really like me being that far away, especially after Dad, but I already have one high school friend there, and another friend I met on Tumblr, so it'll be good."

He didn't try to ask what a Tumblr was; there were many and varied things that he wilfully didn't ask about in the world, just to maintain some kind of grip on sanity. "How did you find me?"

"The Winchesters." Claire took another sip of her coffee. "Took me about a month to get word to them I was looking. Then Dean apparently thought I was going to kill you or something, so he hemmed and hawed for a day before ponying up. Here I am."

Castiel thought there that it was probably not an illegitimate concern. Jimmy Novak and his family were, by any and all accounts, his own first failure; no matter how many years had passed, he was aware of it. It was impossible not to be, when the face that looked back at him in the mirror, in any mirror, didn't belong to him. Even so, he didn't think she would. If she did, though, he couldn't imagine blaming her for it. "Claire..." They seemed to be poor words, but they were all he had. "I'm sorry. I haven't-- I've never stopped being sorry. For you, and for your father."

Claire shook her head. "You said that last time, too. I know."

He blinked. "Last time?"

Claire blinked back. "Yeah. Last time."

There was a moment where he scrambled around inside his now bizarrely organized memories, trying to find when he had ever said those words to any of the Novaks. No such memory presented itself, even in blurred form. It was not something he would forget doing. "I've never said that before," he said, with less certainty than he wanted to.

Claire looked disbelieving. "Yeah, you did. You were so serious about telling us that you chased Mom onto the porch and she punched you in the teeth."

Well. Castiel would _definitely_ have remembered Amelia Novak hitting him. "Did she break her hand?" he asked, and then he wondered why he would even ask that in the first place. As if this actually occurred.

"No. Well, bruised her knuckles some. Busted your lip." Claire looked thoroughly disconcerted. "Don't you _remember_?"

He just shook his head, feeling ever more uneasy. "I would remember that. Perhaps you dreamed it?"

"No. It was real," Claire said, incredulously. "You seemed-- unstable. You were dressed in white and Dad's coat. You said Dad had sent you. Well, a hallucination of Dad. You were kind of nuts, frankly."

Something was very, very wrong here. There was only one time period that could have happened; when he was in the hospital in Indiana. Or, immediately thereafter, before Purgatory. But he had never hallucinated Jimmy Novak while he was there; others, many others, even Dean at one point, but not the soul of his vessel. Perhaps in that time period he was unaware? But why? And even if that were so, even if he had imagined-- He should remember visiting Claire and Amelia after he had some functionality back. Even if not everything that happened in the hospital, he should remember going to see _them_ , particularly as--

" _\--hey._ Are you okay?" Claire asked, wide-eyed, yanking his attention back to the moment so swiftly that he dragged in a sharp breath.

"I never did that." It sounded edged. Castiel cleared his throat, then tried again. "I don't recall doing that."

"Then one of us has a faulty memory." Claire's expression hardened a little, frustration or anger or irritation, but then she shook it off. "You're shaking again."

He looked down, then folded his hands together for a moment in a somewhat vain attempt to steady them again. "Sorry," he said, not entirely sure why.

"You told me -- us -- that if we had any questions, you'd answer them," she said, more quietly. Then she huffed out something of a sad laugh. "Figures you'd forget that, doesn't it?"

It wasn't even a barbed statement, more resigned and tired, but it still added another layer of guilt and regret on top of the several layers of it Castiel already had, in addition to the feeling that he wanted to make for the door and go through anything standing in the way by force if necessary. And the feeling that something was very, very wrong just intensified; this was a moment when humanity was almost intolerable, not just very difficult, and he tried hopelessly for another moment to dig through his memories, searching for anything that seemed remotely in line with what Claire was telling him.

"Maybe--" He took a very careful sip of coffee, and had to hold the mug with both hands, then said, "Maybe you should tell me what you remember."

Later, in retrospect, he would think perhaps he should have waited to ask that until after switching to decaf.


	4. III.

It turned out that not only could angels go nuts, but ex-angels could have full-blown panic attacks.

The afternoon had ended in one such disaster; Claire had barely gotten halfway through the story of the last time she had seen Castiel, and he was out the door almost before she had time to realize that he had even moved. Which left her blinking and paying for the coffee, and trying to figure out exactly where all of this went so _wrong_.

Though, maybe he hadn't expected it; he seemed as surprised by it as she was. Leaning against the side of the building, he looked every bit as frightened and desperate as her Dad did, the one glimpse she had of him before he was again gone from her life, as the angel made the leap between them. Now it was Castiel who was wide-eyed, dragging in air, not really even able to speak. Though, he did manage to hold up a hand in what was probably a wholly ridiculous attempt to pretend he was just out for a stroll or something.

Claire had shoved her own shaking hands into her pockets and explained, she hoped helpfully, "It's a panic attack. It'll go away, just breathe."

It wasn't like she wasn't an expert. Even so, some part of her was (maybe darkly) amused at the vaguely incredulous look she got back, though not for the obvious distress he was in. Even as she was actively working to keep back the rush of memory and misery hiding behind several years of therapy constructed coping mechanisms herself.

It took him probably another five minutes to manage words, and those were, succinctly, "This is _wretched_."

Claire had nodded. It was. She knew. She used to have them all the time, back when she was in her early teens. Therapy had helped, and in the end she had managed to get herself back together enough not to melt down like that. She couldn't quite drum up any sympathy for him, but she couldn't make herself feel satisfied for it, either. She just wondered what it was about the tale, which was not particularly long or detailed or even _bad_ , that could cause a reaction like this. "Keep breathing. Don't faint."

Castiel opened his mouth, and she wouldn't have been shocked if he handed back sarcasm, but then he just nodded and went back to breathing, still shaking but not as badly, sinking down to sit against the wall and looking strung out and stressed. "I think it's ending."

"Good." She wasn't exactly sure what more she could say about it.

None of this was going anything like what she expected.

They parted ways after that; he asked if she had somewhere to stay, and Claire honestly didn't have an answer. Not because there weren't motels, but because she didn't know if she'd be here tomorrow. If there was any point to it, when everything she wanted to know was something he couldn't even remember. But after all of that looking, it seemed like a waste not to try again, so finally she had answered yes and he had opted to walk home, and told her he was working the next day until one-thirty, and... that was it. Claire went and checked into a room. Called her mother. Didn't have it in her to tell her mother that she'd found the now ex-angel. Turned on the television, but she wasn't really seeing it.

She fell asleep and woke up the same way: Sobbing, lost and desperate tears, alternately angry and longing and sad and frustrated and frightened and wistful. And then, she made herself get up and start the day all over again.

 

 

"Are you _drunk_?" she asked, incredulously, taking in the red-eyed, rumpled and slightly swaying form of her father, currently occupied by not-her-father.

"Hung over," Castiel answered, a rasp of a whisper. Then, with a little more volume, even though he was pretty much permanently wincing, he elaborated, " _Very_ hung over."

The lady at the store had been nice enough to direct her to where Castiel was living, which was a room over a garage belonging to a guy named Will, who owned an excavating company and worked from home. All around the large property, fringed in trees, was heavy machinery and plenty of mud, and the smell of the air was a mix between diesel fuel and winter, dirty and clean mingling, and she tried not to actually take it as a metaphor for her life. Apparently, 'Steve' had called off of work for the first time ever, and the lady -- Nora -- had been given instruction that if Claire had shown back up, to give her directions, which honestly kind of surprised her. After yesterday, she hadn't thought he necessarily wanted to see her again.

But despite being very hung over, he left the door open, reeled back to the plaid couch that had seen better days, and folded into it looking like death warmed over.

Claire took the invitation with some trepidation; stepped in and closed the door. There was a bottle of extraordinarily cheap vodka sitting on a small, battered end table and it was mostly empty. Apparently, he hadn't been screwing around about getting hammered. "I have some Tylenol in my purse," she finally said, automatically keeping her voice down; been there herself, before.

"No, thank you."

"Do you have water?"

Castiel reached over, fumbled blindly and then held up a half-empty water bottle that had slipped between couch cushions. Claire was a little relieved he knew enough about being hung over to have that. She was also oddly piqued that he knew enough about being hung over to have that, too.

It was getting steadily harder to reconcile overwhelming power with wide-eyed insanity with this, and all of that on top of her missing father; she felt almost hopelessly lost.

In deference to the hangover, though, she kept quiet, stepping over and settling on the other end of the couch. There was a wood stove warming the room, and she did her best to lose herself in the red glow of it. Eventually, though, she had to ask, "Did it help?"

"Temporarily." He uncapped his water and took a slow, very careful sip of it, then went back to being curled miserably around himself, tucked into the arm and the back of the couch. "It wasn't worth it."

"It rarely is."

She felt his look, but she didn't acknowledge it; if he tried to pull any fatherly advice on her, she would probably have to take a page from her mother's book and hit him. She was a little surprised at how nonviolent she had been feeling (more like a car crash victim, reeling and dazed), but that would cross lines that he had no business crossing.

Some part of him must have picked up on it. He said nothing, just worked over his forehead and eyes one-handed, a move so much an echo of her father's that she wanted to start crying again.

At some length, though, he spoke again, "I was dreaming, last night. Or this morning. I'm not sure which. I was standing in the Garden, and my brother flew down from his place around the throne and alighted next to me. He asked me if I would come and sing with him. I looked down, and I had my blade in hand, and I didn't say anything. It was a dream, but it was also-- a memory. This had happened; I remember that I wanted to say yes, but something stopped me and I couldn't. Nothing outside, no one made me not answer, but something stopped me even so. It was the last time we spoke directly, although I often heard his voice amongst the others in the centuries thereafter; he loved nothing more than to sing, even if walking the Earth was a close second." A beat. "I killed him last year. And now, for the second time since the creation of angels, the choir is silent."

The tone was matter-of-fact, but even rough-voiced and coarse, there was almost a lyricism to it. She remembered his voice, his real voice, not this much harsher version of her father's; it didn't surprise her that he could manage elegance, in a more plain-spoken way.

To keep herself from falling apart again, Claire answered it with something of her own, maybe an offer into her own mind, one that she could control, "About four hours east of here, there's this little town, just two roads, right in the middle of farmland. I stopped there at this old-style diner, the kind that looks like it was made out of a train car, in the early morning and the counter was packed wall to wall with farmers, wearing ball caps with brand names on them. And I just sat there listening to them for about an hour, sitting in a booth, having breakfast and drinking coffee. Just-- their lives. They do this every day, before the sun's even up; come in, have breakfast, talk. Complain a lot. It was very..." Claire thought about it, thought about how to describe it, and only ended up saying, "real. It felt very real."

She could feel his undivided attention; she thought, if he were still an angel, it might even be a tangible feeling. She didn't look away from the fire, though, to confirm it. Maybe because it would also be real, maybe because it wouldn't. "Almost... nothing feels like that," she said.

"No," Castiel said, quietly. She listened to him breathe, a careful rhythm, and then he said, "I was hoping I would remember something. Admittedly, I think I was also hoping I would forget, as well."

Claire felt the corner of her mouth creep up of its own accord, but it wasn't a happy half-smile. "That's-- refreshingly, disturbingly human."

"Yes."

"I used to think if maybe I screwed up enough, someone would notice. Not Mom, Mom always noticed, but sometimes she was so messed up herself that she just couldn't _do_ anything about it. But I thought, I guess maybe I thought, that if I acted bad enough, that you would bring Dad back, because Dad would be angry and have to deal with it--" Claire cut herself off, drawing her legs up and resting her feet on the edge of the couch, one arm wrapped around her knees, one to pillow her chin on. "Stupid, childish thoughts, but they made so much sense at the time, you know?"

There was something warm and sad in his voice, which just made her heart hurt worse. "I believe that's also refreshingly and disturbingly human."

"Yeah," Claire huffed, sick of crying, sick of trying not to cry. "I guess so."

"I think," he said, "I still owe you coffee."

Claire wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked over; he looked back, and even pretty much a human wreck, there was something soft in his expression, like she actually mattered. It was too much to take for more than a moment, so Claire pulled herself together, mopped her face off, and stood. "Okay."

"Okay." And gingerly, Castiel managed to get up, not quite steadily, to get his coat from where it was hanging on a nail.

"What was his name?" she asked, as he slowly pulled himself together. "I mean, your brother."

"Samandiriel." Castiel took a breath, and let it out, and it was heavy and only then did the factual tone crack enough to hear a grief so deep there was no light that could touch the bottom. "His name was Samandiriel."

 

 

There was apparently only so much honesty they could take at a time. The car ride was silent; she didn't put her music on, taking into account his headache, and he didn't speak, just leaned his head against the glass, mostly keeping his eyes closed. Probably not too far from being car sick, all given, but he didn't complain.

Despite that, it wasn't the same kind of uncomfortable it had been.

They ended up in the next town over at a Perkins; halfway through the carafe of coffee, he took her up on the Tylenol. When they started on their second and finally ordered breakfast, something had settled enough to speak again.

"I can't remember why." Castiel stared into his mug of coffee like it held the answers, fingertips pressed against it, both hands. "I can't remember why I killed my brother. I know it must have something to do with Naomi, because he was trying to warn me about her, but as to what actually caused me to do it, I don't know. My memory hands me the words self-defense." He shook his head, still gingerly. "Samandiriel was-- I suppose if I were to ascribe a human term, a pacifist. He had no interest in waging war; my Father changed us all, but him least of all, I think. My mind tells me one thing, but it's not the thing that I know to be true."

Claire felt like she was hearing a story two-thirds of the way through. And some part of her wanted to ask what this had to do with anything, but it only took her about two seconds to put it together and realize where he was going with it.

She was also exceedingly glad that in the miserable weather they were all alone in the back section, where no one could hear an ex-angel talk about fratricide. She wondered what it said about her own mental state that she could sit here and listen to it and not be afraid.

"It took us a year," she said, after it became clear he was waiting to say more. For whatever reason. "After you visited, it took us about a year to get over it. You were there like, fifteen minutes. And it took us a year. I'm not--" Claire stopped, and she knew it was coming, so she shook her head. "I'm not looking for an apology. I just-- I wanted you to know? I guess. To listen."

"That, I can do." Castiel offered a wan sort of smile to the waitress who brought their breakfast -- pancakes for her, eggs and toast for him -- and then went back to his coffee once she left again. "I'd give him back, if I could. If he were here."

Somehow, she didn't doubt that. She let it be quiet for awhile; to back away from the edge of yet more tears, to hopefully keep this hard-won ground of something that might be a cousin to steadiness. They worked on their breakfast in silence; forks scraping, coffee mugs clinking. It was slow; him still shaking off getting smashed on cheap vodka, her still just trying not to feel like she was hit by a car.

"You--" Claire started, stopped. Poked the last piece of her pancake. "I think I would have hated you more, if you hadn't-- I mean, you were nuts. At the time. And it messed us up for a long time. But I guess-- I'm glad. That you came to tell us he was gone."

"I should have sooner." He gestured to his head, a vaguely frustrated motion. "I-- it makes no _sense_. Nothing in my memory says I did this; that I came to you and your mother. And my memory is unreliable right now, but not so unreliable that I'd forget doing that. But if it was Naomi, then why _this_? Why would she take this? What could it have to do with anything, in regards to her keeping me under control; it had no bearing on anything she was trying to do. Why would she take those memories?"

"I don't know," Claire said, a little helplessly. He shot her an apologetic glance, then went back to more staring at his coffee than drinking it. "No, I don't mean-- maybe if you told me what any of this meant, I'd be able to--" She stopped. Able to what, help? Help the angel that hijacked her Dad.

But then, it wouldn't be the first time she'd helped him. Maybe this time, it wouldn't end in devastation.

Castiel sighed, looking tired and defeated. "I don't know what good could come of it. Naomi is dead. Apparently, it wasn't anywhere near the first time that she had been in my mind rearranging things to her satisfaction; if I didn't retrieve those memories when I broke the connection, then likely these are irretrievable as well."

Claire felt something in her go cold, then hot, then red hot. She stared until he actually shrank back in his chair, and only barely managed to keep her voice down. "Because it _matters_. Because you came and messed me and Mom up for a year, and the only thing that made that bearable, the only reason I even came looking for you, is because when you talked about my Dad--" Her voice cracked and her eyes blurred, but she soldiered on, fiercely, "You made it sound like he mattered. Not some bullshit about-- about him being useful or serving God, but that he saved _you_. He saved the world, and he saved you, and you _said that_."

"Claire," he tried, looking more and more spooked. "I-- of course he mattered, but--"

"But _what_ , Castiel?" she asked, the first time she'd addressed him by name since getting here. Some part of her wanted to keep the pressure on, too. But she took a breath to try to calm back down; him bolting again wouldn't do either of them any good, and he looked like he was rapidly approaching that point. She grit her teeth, and then just said, "You wanted to know what good."

There was a long silence where he stared at her, wide-eyed and clearly waiting for more. Then, when it didn't come, he just said quietly, "I did, didn't I?" before looking out of the sleet streaked window.

The wait for their check was passed in silence; her, trembling with her coffee mug. Him, the heel of his palm rubbing hard at his chest, over his heart, like it was hurting and staring pensively out the window.

Or at the reflection in it.


	5. IV.

The first weeks after his grace was stolen from him were spent in something of a daze. For how visceral the so-called human experience was, compared to that of a fully-powered angel, looking back Castiel could see more clearly that he had been in some state like shock. Drifting between blank disorientation and forced optimism, anchorless and lost, divorced from anything deeper for fear of what might happen if he acknowledged it. He clung to the inane and mundane, to some blind determination that since he had gotten himself into this situation, he would have to simply live with it and make the best of it.

He caught glimpses of himself slowly after that. Climbing on the bus after Dean kicked him out of the bunker with a handful of crumpled bills and a hastily put together photo ID, he became aware of a breath-stealing mix of anger and fear. Obviously, given how unpleasant that was, he did everything he possibly could to _not_ feel it. It wasn’t Dean’s fault he was the Host’s pariah and it wasn’t Dean’s fault that he had been so foolish as to allow himself to be cornered by the Scribe. It wasn’t Dean’s fault that he’d destroyed things yet again. Getting angry did Castiel no good.

Fear was more immediate anyway. Fear happened every time physical exhaustion overcame his ability to fight it off. Fear was every time he woke up feeling some ghost of pain in the phantom memory of his war-scarred wings, the sense he had been flying for his life all night long. Fear was looking at Ephraim and saying he wanted to live because he was more afraid of the pain of dying in that desperate moment, and it was doggedly pretending that what drew Ephraim to him in the first place was somehow resolved with that declaration.

He went back to work. He made a routine. He decided he was going to stay out of the way because every time he interfered, he made things worse. He stopped seeking contact with other people, aside in the most casual sense; he would only end up hurting them, he was sure, if he didn’t stop. Castiel never truly felt safe, but he at least did not feel like he was crashing blindly through everyone and everything all in some effort to right things.

To be good.

Claire Novak was taking it all apart, and she didn’t even know it.

_You wanted to know what good._

 

 

“I don’t remember how I got out of Purgatory, but according to Naomi, she rescued me with the help of a large number of other angels,” Castiel said, staring out of the windshield of the car at the trails of ice and rain tracking down to swell on the edge of the wipers, laying there, being swept off. Over and over and over. “She was the head of Intelligence; much like your government has its intelligence, so too does Heaven, though I was unaware it was a formal thing until quite recently. Their job was not to gather information on the enemy, however, it was to keep us from rebelling; from following Lucifer’s example.”

Claire didn’t say anything, but he could feel her watching him; could see the edge of her gold hair lying curled against her shoulder, could see the line of her jaw in his peripheral vision. He never understood, until very recently, why humans found scrutiny so difficult to handle. Now, he knew.

Still, after a moment working through his disjointed, disorganized thoughts, Castiel continued, “We have never been emotionless. As a-- a species. But we were forbidden expression. Forbidden from acting on our emotions. According to Naomi, I was-- I was--”

_”You have never done what you were told. Not completely. You don't even die right, do you?”_

“Hey. Slow down,” Claire said, when the silence had gone on for a little while, broken only by the sound of his own too-short breaths. Her voice was surprisingly soothing; Castiel wasn’t sure why she wished to be so kind as that, given what he had done to her and her family, but he was grateful for it and guilty for it all at once. “Look, I’m not-- I don’t know exactly where you’re going with this, but it’s pretty clear it’s messed you up, so slow down. Okay? I mean, I’m not-- I’m not gonna leave yet, so just take your time.”

After a moment, Castiel managed a nod, grasping onto the tone of those words and pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes, where his hangover had mostly retreated into a dull throb which matched the gray and dismal day outside. He could not seem to hold his thoughts together; they kept running off, disintegrating.

Claire was apparently taking a great deal of mercy on him. He could give her nothing of what she was looking for, and yet still she stayed and now she was trying to give him space to breathe.

It made him wish he could scratch out of this borrowed brain matter the things she wanted to know, the things he himself had apparently promised to give her once. He wondered if it was the echoes of Jimmy Novak, somewhere hidden in tissue and electrical impulses that she sought from him; he could occasionally feel them, even, like some sense of _deja vu,_ as humans called it; of having been somewhere before, doing something the same before.

It wasn’t what she _said_ she wanted, before he bolted out of the diner and forgot how to breathe in his fear, but he didn’t know what he himself could even offer.

“He used to sing in the car,” she said, perhaps giving Castiel more space, perhaps crowding more into it. Her voice was two parts casual and one part taut, and she said, “I don’t think he even really knew he was doing it. Some song he liked would come on and then he’d be singing along and I guess--” Her voice cracked, then steeled again. “I guess, according to Mom, when I was little I’d start wailing right along with him.”

Heartache was such a powerful thing.

“She has all these records, boxes of them, and we don’t even have anything to play them on.”

Despite himself, Castiel tried to think of what kind of music Jimmy Novak would have listened to; despite himself, he came up with nothing concrete, only that same sense of _deja vu._ He tried to envision the man listening to choral hymns, proclaiming his devotion to his faith, and it refused to fit. After another moment, he let the thought go, feeling tired and sore and again lost.

“According to Naomi, I was always defective. She said I had a crack in my chassis.” The part that Castiel hated, truly hated, was that he could see where she could be _right_. The last time he could remember where he felt like he was good was in Stull Cemetery, facing an impossible foe, certain to die for a cause and ready to do it. Everything after that was some varying degree of wrongness.

Sometimes, in quiet moments, he let himself think that he should have died there.

“It might help if I knew who you were talking about,” Claire said, after a few more moments, breaking into the silence that fell while he fell down into the spiral of thoughts old and rooted in; Castiel supposed that he knew that, that he should have told Claire who Naomi was, specifically, and what she did. What the work of Intelligence was.

So, after a short spell of steeling his stolen spine and forcing this damnable unsteadiness behind the closest, shabbily erected psychological wall he had available, he did.

This time, he was the one who had to follow her out to see if she was all right.

 

 

“I’m fine,” Claire said, which was entirely at odds with the way her arms moved like they were independent of her control, swinging out and then up and then crossing, with the breakfast she had left on the pavement and with the sound of her voice, hoarse and sharp and what Castiel would consider borderline hysterical.

“You don’t look fine,” he said, a little cautiously, but he was already shrugging out of his coat and edging over to hold it over her head, where the rain was plastering her hair to the sides of her face. “Nor sound fine.”

Claire looked like she wished to protest, and then either was too weary to or perhaps just too shaken to. She uncrossed her arms, wiping at her face, and Castiel wondered if she was chasing rain or tears. She opened her mouth to say something, and then stopped herself and her mouth went into a line which quivered, and she turned her head and stared off to the side as if there was some answer out there which neither of them could see.

Castiel took the opportunity to edge closer, more fully covering her head from the rain, and for the moment not feeling it himself as he fretted over what she was thinking. He wasn’t sure _why_ she was so distressed; what could have made her feel so badly that she had to leave the car and vomit and perhaps cry and certainly be upset.

For a moment, it looked like Claire was ready to shove him back away, but then her shoulders sagged and she palmed down her face. “That’s-- that’s really screwed up.”

“What is?” Castiel asked, a few breaths later, when Claire didn’t elaborate further.

She looked back at him a little incredulously. “What she did to you. What she did to the others.”

“Ah-- yes, it was,” he said, uncertainly, not quite sure in what way she meant. It _was_ awful, angels were not machines, but the visceral reaction seemed at odds with what Castiel was thinking, versus what Claire apparently was. “She’s dead now, though.”

Claire drew a breath in through her nose and stared at him and again looked ready to say something, and again stopped herself and looked no less stricken. Castiel was not sure where the urge to wrap arms around her and shelter from this as well as the rain came from, but perhaps it was that same thing etched into these very bones, some distant echo of the man who owned them, like a ghost haunting them both.

Silence fell again. A minute. A second. He was only just starting to come aware of the fact that they were both shivering when she asked the question that started this: “Why this?”

And then she asked the question that was really at the heart of it: _”Why him?”_

 

 

There was no answer. Not for either of them.

That very nearly was the end of it.

“You act like him,” Claire said, like it was half a plea and half an accusation, after they had driven for nearly an hour, not going anywhere in particular and yet somehow feeling as though they were running from something and seeking something, all at once. During that time, they tried talking more about it, tried to see if there was any hint left, any trace of a memory left, anything. And every time, they were both left feeling disappointed. “You cross your arms like him, you rub your forehead like him. You look off and huff when you’re upset, just _like him_.”

In all of this time, from when she stepped back into his life to this moment, there was no part of Claire Novak which seemed a child. Even as young as she was, she carried herself with maturity and a certain hard-bitten strength. Even with no right whatsoever to feel any pride for her, Castiel did anyway; that she had turned out so very graceful despite it all.

But in this moment, Castiel could hear that little girl. The one whose father he stole. The one who never got to say goodbye.

The one he had to let down again, perhaps for the last time.

“I’m sorry, Claire,” he said, the pall of defeat settling in anew; it ached at the base of his throat how much he meant those words, and it weighed heavy in this chest, Jimmy’s chest, how tired that defeat left him feeling.

“I know,” she said, bottom lip twitching again, her chin going up as she added with gentle but cutting honesty, “Me too.”

It very nearly ended there. Claire turned around to head back to town, to take him back to his room, and Castiel was not sure if he felt relief that it seemed this was over, this probing and questioning, or if he just felt like he had finished nailing the last nail in Jimmy Novak’s coffin, a closed-casket affair without a body, a final bit of damage that Castiel could cause the Novaks before hopefully never doing so again. Once again, the drive was largely passed in silence, but for the music Claire turned on halfway through. Some of the newer songs Castiel was familiar with from the store’s radio. MP3s, Claire called them.

“I would like it, if you kept in touch,” he said, when they were about ten minutes out; the heater was on, and the impending separation made the air feel thick. “Ah-- I understand if you don’t want to, I don’t blame you, but if you wanted to, I would like it.”

Claire nodded, but it wasn’t really an affirmative or a negative, just acknowledgment. Castiel hoped, sincerely, that she would do what was best for her in this case. And if that meant not keeping in touch, so be it. “So you’re just going to stay here? Cashier at a gas station?”

“For now,” he said, and was about to go on, but then he stopped and tilted his head at the humming from the radio, playing something different from what had been on the last half-hour.

It wasn’t two bars in before his vessel’s heart lurched and started to beat faster, and he didn’t even know why.

 _“Let us be lovers,_  
_“We’ll marry our fortunes together;_  
_“I’ve got some real estate here in my bag!_  
_“So, we bought a pack of cigarettes,_  
_“And Mrs. Wagner Pies,_  
_“And walked off to look for America..._

_“‘Kathy,’ I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,  
“‘Michigan seems like a dream to me now…’”_

For a moment, he almost remembered what his own voice sounded like.

“'...It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw...'”


	6. V.

She would be gone in the morning.

Claire didn’t know if she would call this closure or failure, or if sometimes things could be both of those.

She wondered if her tears would dry, at least enough for her to go a day without them again. She wondered what she was going to tell her mother, if anything. She wondered how she was going to put to the grave those last quiet hopes that there was something of James Novak left in this world outside of her own self and an ex-angel wearing his skin, and she didn’t know.

She dropped him off as evening was settling in, heavy and dark and still-wet, and she went back to the hotel room; she didn’t want to spend the night, but she felt exhausted and heartsore.

Closure. Failure.

Was it closure if you couldn’t tell it from failure?

 

 

The eyes that looked back in the mirror had never been his, but Castiel studied them anyway, wondering if there was some answer in the reflection of an absent good man that told a story he should know himself. Jimmy’s eyes; Claire’s too.

He was very proud of her, even though he had no right to be.

She would be gone in the morning, and he didn’t know if that was relief or grief or some poignant mix of the two of them. He would go back to work tomorrow, and for some reason, that thought would not fit no matter how hard he tried to jam it in there; that tomorrow the mundane and inane would return, and he would be no better nor worse than he had been at the beginning of the day before.

Eyes that were not his own looked back at him, and when he pressed his hand to the glass, there was something missing on the other side.

 

 

“Hi Mom.”

Claire was good at lying. She wondered if that was something she got from her father; despite every part of her forever-young self crying out that Daddy had been good and honest and kind and perfect (as all Daddys should be), she knew better. He lied before he left, he lied after he came home, and then he was gone. She understood him as well as any child could understand their parent, and she loved him, but she had long since lost the illusion that he was some paragon of virtue _or_ some helpless innocent forced into leaving them.

Her mother wasn’t good at lying; wore her heart on her sleeve and her courage on her forearm like a shield. But she had good instincts, finely honed in the fires of their lives. “You found him,” she said, didn’t ask, and Claire knew she could lie and she also knew she wouldn’t now.

“Yeah,” she said, pushing her rain-raggled hair back off of her forehead. Her mouth kept quivering and it made her voice tremble. “He’s-- he’s not the same.”

There was silence on the other end of the line for a long moment, the silence that meant her mother was trying to deal with her own feelings and very likely with a quivering mouth, too. “Did he hurt you?” she finally asked, and Claire knew that if the answer was ‘yes,’ it wouldn’t matter how much her mother wanted no part of it; she would track him down and throttle him with her own bare hands.

“No, no.” It was even the truth. “I mean, yeah, it hurt. But he didn’t hurt me. I’m--”

Okay?  Coming home? Going to school? What now?

 

 

_’Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping. ‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why…’_

He had never tried to really piece together what had been taken from him before. Angelic memory was not the same as human memory; vessel or no, he was-- _once_ was-- a creature made of light and grace and thought. There was no gray matter to be prodded into memory by electrochemical impulses; no scent of a rose bringing back a wedding, no crisp bite of the air bringing back the first memories of autumn. What was lost was lost forever. Before, he had held some vague hope that perhaps they had been stored somehow, but once Naomi was dead and the Host lost, even that had evaporated.

But there was _something_ and when he listened hard enough, Castiel could almost hear it.

He sometimes wondered when he had become so very afraid. He remembered a time when he felt certain of himself, but was that even real?

The marker he used to mark stock boxes in the back room of the station squeaked against the mirror as he wrote; sometimes English, sometimes Enochian. Sometimes pausing to pace with the marker left resting on the sink, both hands buried in his hair, breath coming in short little huffs in and out of his nose.

If he could find the negative spaces, perhaps he could find what shape the hole was that they left behind.

 

 

Dad’s family had scattered to the four winds long before Claire was born. It turned out that Dad and his own father had something in common: They had both left their young families and never returned. Though, Claire didn’t think Gregory Novak likely walked off because he was sweet-talked away by an angel. He was buried somewhere down south, somewhere in Texas. Grandma was buried in Chenoa, the little town where her father had grown up until moving to Pontiac. Jimmy Novak’s bones were still walking around; neither Claire nor her mother had the heart to have his name etched on a gravestone.

She wondered if now wasn’t the time to do that, though. Go through the rituals that Heaven and Hell had both denied them. Follow the customs, find solace in the traditions. If there was any to be found. Maybe sell those old records that belonged to his mother, a failed flower-child who kept the music but returned home to her own church-going family, in the hopes that Claire wouldn’t feel an ache every time one of those old songs came on the radio or over some store’s loudspeaker. Put him to _rest_ , and maybe then find closure.

Somehow, Claire doubted it.

She turned off the bedside lamp and stared into the darkness, but it was a long time before sleep came.

 

 

Human minds, by necessity, filtered things out and committed certain things to longterm memory while discarding others. Angels had no such need; before his grace was stolen, Castiel could recall a million years before with the same clarity as he could the day before. On the other hand, humans had a far stronger concept of _continuity_ ; of fully appreciating what it was to have a past and a future, along with the present.

Angels were poor at both of those. The concept of a future was nearly nonexistent; even Castiel, who was better at it than most of his siblings, struggled to visualize such a nebulous concept. The only time he excelled at such things was when he was at war, which was less imagination and more necessity. Otherwise, the past was the past and the future was the future and whatever skills he had picked up, he was a creature of momentary context even now. Learning that Naomi had hacked his memory apart before -- perhaps many, many times before -- had left him feeling shaken, but it had never occurred to him to look back and ask, _“What did you take from me?”_

And _Why why why?_

When he ran out of the room on the mirror, he used the coupons that were delivered in the mail, his penmanship somewhat ruined by the effect of black marker on cheap newsprint. But he spread out all ten sheets and used them anyway. When he ran out of those, he got old envelopes his paychecks were delivered in.

Hours ticked by. Midnight passed. One. Two.

 

 

She woke up sometimes to her mother’s eyes flashed over black, the sting of her hand, the sight of her pulling the trigger. Even though Claire knew full-well that Amelia had no part in any of that. But Amelia had felt it and she had seen it, screaming internally as her body was used, as she was restrained against her will, forced to act against everything in her.

She remembered her mother waking up screaming, waking Claire screaming, especially in those early days. There was no therapist who could talk her through it, either; Claire’s mother rebuilt their lives slowly and painfully despite it, relying on her own grit.

What Claire had wanted to ask Castiel, when he said that Naomi was dead, was whether she lived in his nightmares now, instead.

 

 

By the time he finished writing, it was two hours before he would have been due to go to work.

”I’m sorry, Nora,” he said, standing on her doorstep rain-soaked and breathless, the sky only beginning now to pale towards dawn, and the concern in Nora’s eyes as she looked him over was both touching and oddly painful. That she cared this much. “I wouldn’t do this, but--”

”It’s about that girl, isn’t it?” Nora asked, wrapping her robe tighter around herself against the chill; behind her, her daughter squeaked happily and Castiel could hear the sound of something scattering across the floor. Likely Cheerios.

Despite everything, that sound made him smile, the corners of his mouth tugging into a little lopsided grin. “It is. She’s the daughter of someone-- the daughter of two people who are very important to me.”

Even if he could not remember why, something in his chest settled for speaking that truth.

Nora nodded, glancing behind her; she still looked worried, but she held up a hand and got him by the back of a shoulder and gave him a gentle nudge off the stoop and towards the door. “Come in for a second, Steve.”

 

 

When Claire opened the door, ready to walk away in either closure or failure, there he was.

Exhausted looking, damp from the rain that had finally broke, and the low morning sun which was burning away the clouds did him no favors, but what Claire noticed first and last was that there was some set to his shoulders she had not seen since arriving, and some spark of something sharp and intent in his stolen eyes that reminded her of that long-ago voice, the one whispering in her ear, offering her a chance to save her family.

“What changed?” she asked, before she had time to think about the words; they jumped out of her mouth before she could wonder if they were a good idea.

“You were right,” Castiel said, adjusting the strap on the battered but functional backpack he had slung over his shoulder. “When you told me what good this was. When you said that he matters. There is,” he gestured loosely with his free hand at his own chest, “negative space. Too much of it. I can almost see the shape, though, of what used to be.”

Claire’s heart lurched and she wasn’t sure if this was the fear she used to remember feeling, or something else, something maybe like hope. Or if it was, like so many things, some strange and exquisite mixture of both.

 

 

When he had finished writing, when he stared at all of his words, when he realized how many holes there were and where they were, when he really thought about it, it was almost too much to bear.

He was hurting and tired and terrified by then, every single missing piece giving him a jolt of adrenaline, but there was something else there, too. Some answer he had not even been aware he was seeking, in answer to a question he had not even been aware of asking; some desperate yearning that belonged to no one, so perhaps it belonged to a ghost.

Castiel wasn’t aware of how long he sat there, staring, waiting to see if the emptiness and yearning would coalesce into a shape he could recognize, but when he finally broke, he was moving to stuff his meager belongings into his pack and to burn his papers and wipe off the mirror and to get the money he had been saving diligently out of the spare sock in the bottom drawer of the dresser and to snuff the coals of his fire and to bolt out the door and down the stairs and out to the road in a dead run.

Now, with his last paycheck -- cash Nora gave him -- tucked with the rest and everything he owned on his back, he stood in front of Claire Novak, at her mercy, scared half out of his mind at this thing he was doing.

Now, Castiel asked, “Will you help me?”

 

 

By the time Claire’s fingers quit trembling on the steering wheel, she was driving through mountains and heading back for the plains where she left the farmers she’d spent the morning with and the wide open skies and fields stretched to the horizon.

Every so often she glanced over at the formerly ethereal creature sleeping with his head against the passenger side window, having given into the demands of her father’s bones, the ones he was tied into.

Every so often, when the sun fell through the towering evergreens the right way, he looked almost at peace.

Every so often, when the right song came on the radio, one of her own favorites that she could sing to, Claire could understand why.


End file.
